


old woods, they misled me

by kimaracretak



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: 5 Things, Bad Ending, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Past Character Death, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 12:10:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19829938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: "It's good to have you back." Caduceus smiles up at the sky, watches it blur, change every time he blinks. It's interesting, seeing one sky with two sets of eyes.Or maybe it's two skies. He hasn't asked.[ Five ghosts who possessed Caduceus and left, and one who stayed. ]





	old woods, they misled me

**Author's Note:**

> Serpents betrayed me  
> They crawled in my head and betrayed me  
>  _Old woods, they misled me_  
>  Cut my face and misled me  
> — 'These Woods Breathe Evil', Swallow the Sun

The child in the heather blends in near-perfectly, except for the light reflecting off their pale eyes. Caduceus walks towards it as he might walk towards an injured bird: slowly, when it isn't looking.

He is only half a child himself, but he knows the transparent figure holds a different kind of darkness than the one that has slowly overtaken the graveyard. He cannot resist the temptation to look, to touch. To soothe, to send the thing on its way.

"Where do you belong?" he asks. "We haven't buried any children recently. I haven't planted any hyacinth."

The figure in the heather giggles, one long-nailed hand held up to its mouth. "I'm right where I should be," it says. "So are you."

The heather sways violently as the child creeps forward. Caduceus watches the flowers, the shimmering purple, and is unprepared for the cold light that pierces his chest, for the oddity of looking down and seeing a hand sticking _into_ his ribs.

"Oh," he says. "That's not very polite."

"No," the child agrees, with an oddly sweet smile. It passes through Caduceus' body with a breath of cold that brings him to his knees.

That quickly, he's alone again.

**

"You really should be learning healing spells on your own by now." Clarabelle is fussing, as she always does, turning Caduceus' fractured arm this way and that as she casts _cure wounds_. "Too many cracks in your skin. Who knows how many ghosts might have gotten in while you looked for me."

Caduceus frowns. "They're not so bad, really." Somewhere at the back of his skull, his dryad visitor hums in agreement.

Clarabelle snaps the last bone back into place and gives him a look, like she wants to disbelieve him but can't tell why. "And I thought I was the weird one. Well, off you go, and try not to break anything else."

He doesn't need to be told twice, hopping off the stool and ambling back towards the treeline. "Do you really need broken bones to possess people?" He asks, when they're safely out of Clarabelle's earshot.

The dryad's ghost just giggles, like she did when the shock of her unfamiliarity with his longer limbs sent his body tumbling out of the oak and to the ivy-covered floor.

"Well. Hopefully you don't need ones to leave."

She laughs again. Caduceus looks up at her old home, and waits.

**

Caduceus sets the table from memory: one kettle, two cups, two plates, two spoons, the last set crosswise atop the plates in welcome. The cups are full nearly to the brim, swimming with a dizzying array of rosehips, mint leaves, and nettle blossoms.

Another new combination. Caduceus has yet to give up hope, and the forest has yet to stop providing him with new things to try.

Table set, he waits. Lili is never late, though her grave lies undisturbed.

The kettle rises, tilts dangerously far. "Oh, come on, you haven't even tried this one yet," Caduceus says. Her disapproval has long since stopped feeling like a personal failure, but he can't help but be offended at the potential waste of good tea.

Lili slams into his body, without a word and with much more force than necessary. He tenses as the possession takes hold, fights the urge to resist as she lifts his hand and grasps her mug.

She makes him drink it down far too fast, scalding his throat and barely letting the liquid touch his tastebuds. He assumes she has other means of evaluating the drink.

"I still hate it," his own voice says, and Caduceus sighs.

**

"It's good to have you back." Caduceus smiles up at the sky, watches it blur, change every time he blinks. It's interesting, seeing one sky with two sets of eyes.

Or maybe it's two skies. He hasn't asked.

"Is it though, really?" His sibling's voice is coming from so far away, under so many miles of water.

"Which one? Good, or back? Or - well, or _me_?"

His feet sink deeper into the grass as he leans back against the unmarked stone. "Oh, it's definitely you. Only you would be asking me this many questions, Feàrna."

"And only you would be avoiding so many of them."

"Little brother's privilege." He smirks, despite the gravity of the situation. "Look, it's good. Really, it is. But you know where you are. You know you're not really back."

A sigh, like the rush of waves against the shore. "I didn't think so. But I needed to return to the Grove to finish the cycle. After, well -"

Ah, Caduceus thinks; so this is why he hasn't left yet.

"Caduceus?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you put flowers in our hair? Just for a little while? Just until I have to leave again?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I can do that."

**

Mollymauk drifts like no other spirit Caduceus has ever known. There and gone, laughing one moment and silent the next. None of the others seem to notice, and Caduceus isn't sure whether that's better or worse.

Worse, perhaps: he's the one with the least to say to Mollymauk.

Well. Little that Mollymauk wants to hear, at least. Caduceus is learning that things like I turned your body into tea, don't you have anywhere else to be now? aren't really the best for making friends.

He settles. Shivers and blinks at lets Mollymauk watch his friends for moments whenever they say his name.

"You can't stay here much longer," Caduceus reminds him as they share watch one night on the road to Nicodranas.

Mollymauk twists Caduceus' mouth into a pout. "I know. I'm not good at staying in one place, anyway."

"Is that why you don't want to leave? You're afraid it will be permanent?"

Silence, long enough that Caduceus knows it for the affirmative answer that it is. "I promise you, Mollymauk, that you will never stop travelling, as long as these few remember your name."

Mollymauk believes him, or he doesn't. But Caduceus doesn't see him again, after that.

**

The crumbling half-mansion of the Sour Nest still stands. Caduceus almost imagines, if he tilts his head just right, that he can see Mollymauk's multicoloured coat flying above it.

But the coat stands by the road, and there is nothing but scorch marks and bones to mark the place where he once fought for a never-known friend's memory, where he became part of ... something. Just the mansion. Just ghosts.

The kitchen is empty; time and wildlife have cleaned it of even the meagre supplies that had been left their last morning in the stronghold. Empty, except for Lorenzo, flickering impatiently at the edges of Caduceus' vision.

"I didn't expect you," he admits. "The half-elf, maybe. Or your fighter."

Lorenzo laughs, drifts closer on a rush of wind. "What makes you think they're not here too? They were bound to me."

"Nah." Caduceus tightens his grip on his staff, and waits for the inevitable. It has to be done, to protect the others. "You didn't pay them enough. Just like you didn't pay your little island home in the Astral Sea enough to take you back."

He can't hear the crack of Lorenzo's jaw as it opens behind his head, can only feel the change in the air, the whisper around his spine. "You are not worthy to be swallowed as treasure. No matter, though, I could use a home. For a little while."

Caduceus waits for the familiar seizing snap of possession, the double-layered vision, the certainty that Lorenzo's ghost is trapped.

He feels only the slow descent of deep spectral darkness over his head, slithering down over his forehead, creeping across his eyes.

 _Oh_ , he has time to think as his knees buckle, _this - this is very different -_

And then he has no time to think anything at all.

**

Lorenzo lifts his firbolg head to the sky, and laughs.

**Author's Note:**

> stalls out on watching this show for literally over half a year out of despair over not wanting to watch avantika die, returns with horror: the kimaracretak story.
> 
> this is the most mechanically incorrect fic i've ever written + is playing fast & loose with some oni lore from _monstrous compendium kara-tur appendix_ , which is uh even less recommended than most ad&d 2e sourcebooks tbh.
> 
> would thank the discord gang for inspiration but they didn't believe me when i said the ghost vore was accidental so


End file.
